1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an eye-controlled password input apparatus and, more particularly, to an eye-controlled password input apparatus which generates input commands as data signals according to a user's eye movement.
2. Description of Related Art
Image recognition has found extensive application in various industries. In addition to identifying users' physical features, it enables a diversity of intuitive man-machine interactions, which lends uniqueness to the technology. For example, an eye-controlled electronic device based on image recognition can be operated by the movement of the user's eyeballs. This kind of operation not only is simple and convenient, but also provides enhanced security by eliminating the risks of leaving fingerprints behind—a drawback typical of the traditional key-pressing operation.
Conventionally, eyeball movement is detected by a precise positioning process which involves capturing the characteristic parts (e.g., the canthi, the pupils, etc.) of a user's eye images, establishing reference coordinates for the characteristic parts, and measuring the displacement of each characteristic part. Hence, when a conventional eye-controlled input apparatus is used for input, it must continuously track and update the characteristic parts of the user's eye images and, at the same time, map the locations of the characteristic parts to the coordinates on a display screen so as to determine the direction in which the user looks. The algorithm of the foregoing process, however, is very complicated and tends to prolong computation. It is therefore imperative to increase the convenience of operation of eye-controlled input apparatuses.